Trai plays with your privacy; brace up for junk mails now

NEW DELHI: Your privacy is up for a stake, if you are the one who has sent Trai an email in support or against of the net neutrality campaign.

At the outset, the victim itself was Trai, just after it made public the email–ids of people, its website was hit by DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack by Anonymous India, according to the latter’s Twitter timeline.

Right now, Trai's website says the URL cannot be retrieved.

Now when it comes to you, you will be soon prone to all those spam mails—loans, ads, that you actually hate.

The Trai’s move was uncalled for but Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar says, "I understand that it is the duty of the Trai to make everything that they have received public since it is a public consultation after all."

He, however, maintains that "Still, there is an obligation on them to not reveal personal details like my email address or my phone number."

The telecom regulator had sought responses from service providers, associations and general public for their views on regulating over-the-top applications and services, following which, it received over eight lakh mails.

By releasing the email IDs publicly, TRAI has shown little respect for the privacy of Indian users who had given their views on Net Neutrality and participated in a public debate.

The irony is that even after the site was hacked after a warning, Trai has still not rectified its mistake and at the time of writing this piece, the author could still access these email ids.

It is also ironic that Trai talks about regulating security, safety and privacy of consumers using OTT apps, but does not have a clue on how to handle privacy itself.

(With inputs from Dataquest)